


Surprisingly, We Made It!

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Fantasy AU, Heist, M/M, a poorly thought out heist but a heist all the same
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 01:30:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19307890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: I guess with Komaeda’s luck-curse, it makes a sort of sense that he and Hinata might try robbing this one museum at the same exact, fate-struck time.  Hm.   Good luck, guys!This was written for the Komahina Secret Exchange on tumblr, for tumblr user namsuuuuuuu/Ao3 user hot!!!  It's for the prompt “komaeda and hinata both trying to break into the same place on the same night by accident, only to be chased by the police upon meeting and having to hide in a closet/cupboard/safe together until they leave.”





	Surprisingly, We Made It!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [namsuuuuuuu](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=namsuuuuuuu), [hot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hot/gifts).



> Hi!!! :D This is the first out of three stories I wrote for namsuuuuuuu for this year's Komahina Secret Exchange -- I'll be posting the others over the next couple days 'cause I didn't want to flood the tag. They were all really fun prompts!

The museum became a different place at night — Nagito Komaeda had known it would, but it was something else to see those bustling halls transformed into a grey-tile tomb like this.  The display cases seemed to watch him pass, waiting and polished, decorated with dead things: mummified hands, chipped pottery, swords people had assured him were definitely haunted when he took the museum’s official tour earlier that day.  Komaeda was good at drifting through places most of the time.  He was sure no one from his tour group would remember him when the museum started looking into suspects the next morning.

Komaeda smiled at somebody’s death mask, sitting propped up on a green velvet display in one of those glass cases.  He wouldn’t be here long.  He’d just take what he needed and be on his way.  The security systems fizzled out as Komaeda wandered by, after all.  Bits of dust formed over the cameras, crawling like mold.  This wouldn’t be the first piece of the puzzle to Komaeda’s life he’d stolen out of a museum. If he unraveled the whole mystery of his good luck/horrible luck curse, the roller coaster balance of his existence, maybe Komaeda would even get to rest someday.  Maybe he’d finally know what any of the ridiculous things that happened to him meant.

Komaeda hummed to himself as he strode through the museum.  He patted a display of a saber tooth tiger on the head and murmured, “Hi, kitty,” in a sing-song voice — he was wearing torn clothes, and the edges of his hair were singed from a fire that’d started out of thin air in his hotel room yesterday morning.  Even the air was subject to Komaeda’s madcap luck, see?  His curse.  Even the air would have to explain itself when Komaeda found the crumbly ancient book he’d come here for.  And, you know, figured out how to read it.  He had an anthropologist contact lined up.  It would be alright.

Things always swung back around, for Komaeda.  The dice rolled into a winning order even if they were weighted to go the other way.  At a cost, of course.  Always at a cost.

Komaeda wouldn’t have to pick the display case lock to get the book he needed, he didn’t think.  The thing would just fall right into his open hands, somehow, and then he’d turn on his heal and head out.  The museum smelled like freshly mopped floors and old, rotting paper.  When Komaeda’d passed a security guard earlier, he had waved cheerfully and pretended to flash a badge.  It worked.  It _so often_ worked, and then Komaeda got arrested for a murder he didn’t commit or something just going out to buy bread.  He was used to it.  As used to it as a person could be, he thought.

When the cop bellowed, “Get back here, you!” somewhere off in the distance, well...  Komaeda murmured, “Oh _no_ ,” to himself almost playfully, as if he were keeping up the game.  But then he heard some frantic pounding footsteps right behind him...  The skidding of sneakers  over freshly washed tile, the shattering of a display glass window, all that.  He started to walk a little faster, glancing over his shoulder.

A guy with spiky hair blew by Komaeda, breathing heavily, sneakers squeaking all over the floor in possibly the least-stealthy way possible.  “Get out of here!” the spiky haired guy called.  “Officer Nidai’s not messing around!”

Officer Nidai?  Wonderful.  Komaeda knew Officer Nekomaru Nidai all too well.  Just his luck that guy would be here, wasn’t it?  _He’d_ been suspicious of Komaeda ever since he turned up in town.  Whenever somebody caught Nagito Komaeda in the act, of course he just slipped away again like water between cracks in the concrete.  Like clouds dissolving into the sky.  His luck, eventually, turned.  Always, always.  But that didn’t mean people couldn’t try their own luck at catching him, every now and again.  It was annoying, but Komaeda shrugged off fatal things as “annoying” so often nowadays he was beginning to forget the meaning of the word.

Komaeda sighed and ran a hand through his pale, flyaway hair.  It would’ve been no good to lose this chance — he was so desperately close to another piece of his puzzle.  He stared running, too, and by the time he found an open door to duck inside it sounded like Officer Nidai had been joined by a whole crew of cop-friends in the museum hallways.  They were calling encouragement to each other, or something.  Listening to them might’ve been pretty goofy, under different circumstances.  So tragically earnest. It was like they were living in a separate world than the one Komaeda knew.

“What rotten luck,” Komaeda told the cramped, empty room he’d found himself in.  Or, the room he _thought_ was empty, anyway.

The spiky haired boy who’d been charging through the halls flicked on a desk lamp, peering up at Komaeda with a baffled, frustrated expression on.  He’d been hiding under a table, it looked like, and up close Komaeda could see a whole stash of video game stuff secured in a cutesy canvas shopping bag over his shoulder.  Was _that_ what he snuck in here to steal?  That?  There were so many priceless jeweled glass eyes in this particular museum, so many spells written in actual molten gold ink.  Did this guy seriously just rob the Lost and Found?

“Rotten luck?  That’s, uh, one way of putting it.  I _swear_ I locked that door,” the spiky-haired guy hissed.  Komaeda nodded.  Yes, he probably had.  Locked doors didn’t really have anything on a luck-curse, though, did they?

Komaeda locked the door behind him, again, nodding to the boy under the table with a careful smile.  Testing the door so he could see it didn’t just swing open this time, revealing them both to the hall.  The office they’d ended up in was one of those glorified broom closet spaces, books stacked haphazardly everywhere.  There were pinned butterflies hanging on the walls, and dusty photograph frames buried under paperwork on the desk.  There weren’t any windows or obvious trapdoors leading to secret museum catacombs around — yes, Komaeda had found himself stuck in museum-catacombs before, and he’d nearly starved to death before making his way back to the gift shop.  Not a good chance of that here, though, it didn’t look like.  For better or for worse.

Komaeda sized the spiky haired guy up for a second — he was cute, in a flustered, running-headlong-through-a-museum-at-two-AM kind of way.  His hands were broad and warm-looking; his eyes were challenging and proud, as if he were half-convinced Komaeda was a double agent for the museum or something.

“Looks like we’re stuck,” Komaeda said.  “Don’t worry.  I’m sure they’ll go away soon.”

They didn’t, of course.  Just his luck.

...

Hajime Hinata had only been messing around with supernatural nonsense for a handful of weeks, now, and even he could tell the guy he met on his poorly-planned-out museum heist was soaked in weird old curses.  They clung to this dizzy-eyed stranger same as his own skin, same as his shadow.  Hinata would’ve guessed the guy’d been born with those curses already latched on, honestly, and they were at least part of the reason he could slip locked doors open without even trying.  Part of why his smile looked _wrong_ , too, somehow, like Hinata would always be looking at him through a funhouse mirror.

From the stolen-back bag of video game stuff slung over his shoulder, Hinata’s friend Chiaki Nanami said, “We should keep an eye on this guy, maybe, Hajime.  Everyone he loved died...  Messy.  They’re whispering about it right now.”

Chiaki had died so recently, it still didn’t feel real.  She had hung on to pieces of her life without really meaning to, so...  Of course Hinata was doing his best to gather her back up.  Chiaki had been his best friend since they were learning to count, after all.  They had played a few of the games in her old canvas bag together, but not all of them by a long shot.  It was better Chiaki speak through these clunky things — through her old hair ribbons and photographs and commemorative game art books — than disappear completely, if you asked Hinata.  The museum people hadn’t been willing to give him the bag during the day, so this was what had to happen next, right?

He’d tried this the easy way.  At least he had to give himself that. Hinata shifted Chiaki’s bag a little way out of the cursed guy’s view. If anything, the stranger looked softly amused by his efforts. He shook his head.

“I’m not interested in your prizes,” he told Hinata, voice swaying and almost, almost prim.  A former rich-kid’s voice.  “I’m sure you have your reasons for everything, just like I do.  Right?”  After a few moments of awkward, waiting silence, the guy drifted over to the far wall of that tiny office — maybe it was Hinata’s imagination, but it looked like he was feeling through the stacked book piles there with his eyes gently closed.  Trustingly closed.  Eventually, the stranger pulled back, holding a notebook full of dark green pen scribbles that seemed to squirm over the pages.  His rattling laugh was low and muffled in his chest — still a little too loud for Hinata’s comfort though.  Obviously.

“The beginnings of a translation...!” the dizzy-eyed boy murmured. He had to know Hinata had no idea what he was talking about, didn’t he?  “What are the odds, what are the —”

“Could you shut the hell up?  Seriously?” Hinata said.  “Don’t you hear Officer Nidai’s buddies down the hall?”

“Oh, yes,” said the stranger, turning to Hinata with wide eyes and a shaky smile.  “But they won’t hear me unless they’re supposed to.  I’m sorry — you don’t know that...”

“No, I don’t,” Hinata confirmed.

The stranger considered this.  He said, “It was good of you to tell me to run back there.  You’re probably a kind person, aren’t you, Mr. Pointy-Hair?”

“Hinata,” said Hinata, before immediately kicking himself. You’re really, really not supposed to tell people your actual name if you’re trying to rob a place!  ...  Even if they’re trying to rob the same damn place, apparently?  Or at least they’re getting weirdly excited about the chance to snoop through somebody’s spooky notebook?

“ _His_ name is Komaeda,” Chiaki offered from the bag at Hinata’s side. “Nagito Komaeda. If he gives you a different name...”

But Nagito Komaeda didn’t throw around any fake names at all.  He grinned, amazed and warm and slightly mocking, like he couldn’t believe Hinata had actually handed him his name so earnestly.  He stepped over to sit in front of Hinata, moving gingerly, sitting cross-legged on the ground.  He said, “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”

“I’m not exactly making a career out of sneaking into museums, no,” Hinata said, glaring.  “I’m not some comic book supervillain, or anything like that.”

The dizzy-eyed stranger chewed on his lip, thoughtful.  Hinata wasn’t entirely sure he got the joke.  He said, “In that case...  Please, call me Komaeda.  It’s the least I can do.”  His voice was so wandering, hazy and formal both at once.  The notebook disappeared into a pocket inside his long, tattered coat; up close, Hinata realized this stranger — Komaeda — smelled like burning.  His skin was a crisscross of faded scars.

The office/closet doorknob rattled furiously, about then.  Somebody grunted, “Keys’s not working...!” and then, louder, “Wait — damn key snapped off in my hand!”  They stalked away, and Komaeda nodded, again.  Serene as anything, as if stuff like this happened to him every day.

“They‘ll come back,” he said.  “Officer Nidai is a persistent one.”  He might’ve looked self-conscious for a second — realizing he sounded like a hardened crook, or something — because he added, “Or so I’ve heard.  But we have a little while yet, I think.  Are those games in your bag any good?”

“These are my friend’s —” Hinata protested...  But Chiaki shushed him.  Gently.

She said, “They’re _your_ games, now, really,” and “This isn’t my body, Hajime.  Only a window...  You know that.  I can look away, sometimes.  I’ll look away for a little while now, if you want.”

Everyone Nagito Komaeda loved died messily, Chiaki had said.  She didn’t say it again now, but Hinata thought maybe she was reconsidering this dizzy-eyed stranger.  At the very least, he might know how to hurry out of a museum in the middle of the night without getting caught.  He might know what it was like to lose a friend, too, and to want to believe that couldn’t be true with all his heart.  Hinata might get something out of talking to a person like him.

“Be careful,” said Chiaki.  “And be nice, okay?  Unless he turns out to be a jerk.  A cursed jerk.”  Hinata could’ve sworn she was snickering.  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Komaeda’s already giving you ‘I-like-you’ eyes.”

“He is not,” grumbled Hinata.

Komaeda tactfully ignored that last bit.  He said, “Ooh, your friend has ‘Void Escape 2.’ I like that one.”  Komaeda glanced at the door, and then back to Hinata.  “I’ve...  Never played two-player mode, actually.  We could kill a little time?”

This was absurd. This was a million-to-one chance meeting.  This was...

This was Hinata hiding in some musty middle-of-the-night museum office, offering a cursed, supervillain-y stranger snacks from his bag. Trying out a video game together.  What the hell?!

Hinata should’ve known better. On _so many levels_ , he should have known.  But, apparently...  No.

When Officer Nidai finally got that particular office door open, Hinata and Komaeda huddled together under the tiny desk, close enough that the smell of burning felt everywhere for a little while.  Close enough that Komaeda’s wavy singed hair brushed Hinata’s cheek. They’d draped Komaeda’s coat over the both of them in some sort of effort to look like just another lumpy pile.  Maybe books, or crinkled papers, or whatever it was museum researchers wore out in the field.

The notebook Komaeda had been trying to smuggle away felt cold against Hinata’s skin, twitching like a living thing.

Officer Nidai didn’t find them.  Somehow.  Honestly, they made such a terrible pile of paper/field clothes/random crap that Hinata was fairly surprised.  Komaeda, though...  Komaeda shrugged it off and said, “Alright, then.  That’s our cue: time to go!”

They snuck out the museum’s dusky hallways together, then, with Komaeda holding Hinata’s sleeve and guiding him down what he claimed was “the luckiest” path to the parking lot.  The sky was huge and hollow-looking up above them, when they finally made it. Hinata had parked his car at the grocery store down the road — he gave Komaeda a ride back into the city, even though Komaeda’d assured him he would have found his way no matter what.

Just before dropping Komaeda off down some lonely backstreet — one of those tipped-over-garbage-can-alleys, without a proper street name anywhere — Hinata asked something he knew would haunt him whether he managed to choke it out or not.  He asked for Komaeda’s phone number, whatever his curses.  Whatever a weird night this had been.  He tried to ask casually, the way Chiaki might have.  Like he only wanted to be friends. Like he was just a little worried about him, even though...  Huh.

Something had felt right and warm, so _familiar_ , about Komaeda’s hand on Hinata’s sleeve.  About Komaeda’s spinning, smothered laughter.  Whoever he was, whatever he’d done.  Whatever exactly had been translated in that notebook waiting tucked against his heart, just then.

Komaeda shook his head no, and Hinata muttered something embarrassed.  Said to forget he asked; glowered at the road.  Komaeda watched him, apparently baffled.  He folded his arms around himself, leaning the back of his head against Hinata’s car door window.  He would leave dark ash smeared on the glass, when he left.

“I...  Have no idea why you’d want to call someone like me,” Komaeda offered, after a moment of tension, the dark city passing by all around them.  After he’d apparently hunted around his mind for the right words and come back feeling empty-handed.  “I don’t even have a phone.  Never keep any number for long...”  He cleared his throat.  “If you want, though, you can give me your number. I’ll check in with you, until it gets...”  An awkward laugh, here.  “Until you tell me to stop, I guess.”

Maybe that should’ve been enough to scare Hinata off, but he scribbled his number down on a scrap of paper torn out of that cryptic, slithering-ink notebook Komaeda’d stolen anyway.  He couldn’t believe he was doing it, even as his pen slipped and Komaeda clarified, “Is that an eight, or a four, Hinata?” in a soft, wondering voice.

Hinata told him, and Komaeda murmured the full number back, very solemn.  Like a promise.

Hinata took a long, roundabout way home, that night, and Komaeda waved after him until he’d disappeared off to kinder streets.  He turned around on the worn-slick heel of his shoe and started humming again, the way he had back in the museum.  It was a hopeful song, maybe.  It was almost morning.


End file.
